If  you had asked me three years ago if I was a feminist, I would have said no. I would have told you that a woman’s place was in the home and that my dearest wish was to get married, have babies and bake fairy cakes. My mother was, is, a feminist: a corporate high-flying, ball-breaking, glass-ceiling smashing, chairman (never chairwoman) of boards. 

If you asked me today if I was a feminist, I would say yes, firmly, yes. Not because Cambridge has been a bastion of sexism but because Cambridge did what universities are supposed to do: broadened my horizons, gave me confidence, instilled a modicum of ambition. I understand now why bath-time and bed-time and fairy cakes weren’t enough for my mother. I don’t think they would be enough for me.

Feminism is back in the public eye this month. Natasha Walter, a ‘lipstick feminist’ and a graduate of St John’s College has published a new book, Living Dolls: The Return of Sexism. The book has been serialised in The Sunday Times, reviewed by every paper, and Walter was given a full-page interview in The Guardian.

Walter is an interesting case study. She doesn’t go in for the sackcloth and ashes branch of feminism, hasn’t burnt her bra or embraced the dungaree. She worked at Vogue. In the 1990s she wrote The New Feminism which declared that a woman could wear lipstick, could have a white wedding and a city career, and could consume pornography. Girl Power.

Twelve years on and Walter believes that something has gone wrong. The creed of empowerment has mutated. We are all in thrall to pornography, the acceptable image of femininity has narrowed, and intellectual ambition is less important than a Brazilian wax.  

Living Dolls opens in a nightclub where Nuts is hosting a ‘modelling’ competition. Local girls hoping for a contract bare their breasts, kiss each other on demand and writhe dutifully for the cameras. The compere introduces that week’s cover girl: “Buy her, take her home and have a wank!”

Walter’s research takes her to pole-dancing clubs and the homes of prostitutes and pornography addicts. In interview after interview, Walter discovers a gulf between the public face of the sex industry - Billie Piper as Belle de Jour - and its reality, the situation of desperate women, abused, trafficked, and reliant on drugs. She speaks to one prostitute who tells her that “you consent to being raped for money.”

Walter is particularly perturbed by the rise of pornography. While an enterprising teenage boy of the 1960s might have seen a handful of smutty images, a boy turning thirteen today will have seen tens, hundreds, thousands of pornographic videos online. What might once have been taboo - lesbianism, anal sex, group sex, sadism - is now mainstream.

On much of this I agree with Walter. But I also feel let down. Walter paints a compelling panorama of twenty-first-century sexism, but there is no battle-cry, no rallying of the troops. I wanted Walter to provide a manifesto, an action plan for young women to stop being living dolls and start fighting against the returning tide of sexism. At the end of the book she lists ten organisations which do carry the torch of feminism, but this smacks of ‘If you have been affected by any of the issues raised...’ Without mounting a counter-attack to the living doll strangle-hold, the book is nothing more than a catalogue of abused women and confused men.

It is not enough to be a Cassandra listing the ails of society - the Sunday supplements are full of female columnists worrying about lap-dancing and casual sex – what young women need is a call to arms. Choice should not mean being a Page 3 girl because that’s your best chance of marrying a footballer. Most girls don’t marry a footballer, and once the Sun readership has seen your breasts your stock falls rapidly.  But what’s the alternative? A lifetime behind the check-out in Tesco?

Feminism is failing young women and it is failing those from the poorest backgrounds most. Our living dolls must be offered an alternative. Aspiring to be the object of masturbatory fantasy is as limiting as aspiring to have your husband’s dinner on the table at seven every night. We must find new role models. We must do better than to equate Michelle Obama with her toned biceps. She is a Harvard-educated lawyer. She gives careers talks at inner city schools. We must celebrate intelligent, articulate women like Anya Hindmarch, Jo Malone, and Natalie Massenet, all entrepreneurs behind successful creative companies, as alternatives to living doll priestess Katie Price. We must count on Teach First to get motivated, inspiring female graduates into schools. Every girl should aspire to something more than fairy cakes and the cover of Nuts.